The power of being explicit: demystifying work, heat, and free energy in the physics of computation

Understand

Interest in the thermodynamics of computation has revived in recent years, driven by developments in science, economics and technology.

• Given the consequences of the growing demand for computational power, the idea of reducing the energy cost of computations has gained new importance.
• Simultaneously, many biological networks are now interpreted as information-processing or computational systems constrained by their underlying thermodynamics.
• Indeed, some suggest that low-cost, high-density biological systems may help to mitigate the rising demand for computational power and the "end" of Moore's law of exponential growth in the density of transistors.